The television personality and his wife share their experience bringing an all-new look to their NYC home after Hurricane Sandy

Most Read

Fashion photographer Nigel Barker, most known for his roles on The Face and America's Next Top Model, is in the process of rebuilding and redecorating his West Village home after extensive damage from Hurricane Sandy. He and hie wife, Cristen Barker, spoke to ELLEDECOR.com about the experience while at the premiere of 12-12-12, a new film about the Sandy relief fundraiser.

Nigel Barker: We had pretty-much catastrophic damage to the building itself. Everyone had to leave the building for weeks on end, if not more. We were out of the house for 36 weeks. The basement was completely trashed and I lost a significant amount of my photographic archives, as well as much of our personal stuff that we've collected--Chrissy and I have been together for almost 25 years and have two kids, so we stored a lot of stuff in our basement… and it just got ruined and destroyed. We used to collect and give each other ornaments from everywhere we'd been in the world. We lost every single one.

Cristen Barker: It was emotional. At Christmas time, each one of my girlfriends gave me a Christmas ornament. That was sweet that people did that. You rebuild. And we remodeled a little bit. We're still not getting Con-Ed bills though--we're still off the grid!

NB: And there's still no roof in our basement. It really was destroyed.

CB: We stopped saving as much because you realize how transient it can be, and you realize you can give stuff away and move on. Design-wise, we used to have a very eclectic, bizarre, souk, Moroccan thing going on. Now it's much more modern.

NB: You know why? It's because it was collected from all over the world from our travels, then all of a sudden it was gone and it didn't really make sense. So we decided to really clean everything up and we went for a very neutral tone with tans and taupes and creams. It's actually very somber and mellow now. It works, it feels very nice.